Outsmart Yourself: Brain-Based Strategies to a Better You

The brain is an astounding organ, and today neuroscientists have more insights than ever about how it works - as well as strategies for helping us live better every day. These 24 practical lectures give you a wealth of useful strategies for improving your well-being. By presenting evidence-based "hacks" for your brain, Professor Vishton empowers you to take charge of your life and perform better all around.

Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and Be More Productive

Do you ever feel like you're too busy, too stressed, or just too distracted to concentrate and get work done? In Unlimited Memory you'll learn how the world's best memory masters get themselves to concentrate at will, anytime they want. When you can easily focus and concentrate on the task at hand and store and recall useful information, you can easily double your productivity and eliminate wasted time, stress, and mistakes at work. In this book you'll find all the tools, strategies, and techniques you need to improve your memory.

Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit

Wish you had time to exercise? Turned off by the "meat market" scene at most gyms? Or are you simply unsure about how to get started with a daily workout? The good news is that you don't have to follow extreme exercise programs like Insanity and P90X or spend every free moment in the gym to experience the health benefits exercise has to offer. All you need to do is make a simple goal to exercise every day in a way that fits your already busy schedule.

No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness

Do you secretly hate exercising? Struggle to stick with a program? Millions of people try and fail to stay fit. But what if exercising is the real problem, not you? No Sweat translates years of research on exercise and motivation into a simple, four-point program that will empower you to break the cycle of exercise failure once and for all. You'll discover why you should forget about willpower and stop gritting your teeth through workouts you hate. Instead you'll become motivated from the inside out and start to crave physical activity. You'll be hooked!

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health

For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet despite this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates, like white flour, easily digested starches, and sugars, and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number.

Eight Weeks to Optimum Health

Eight Weeks to Optimum Health focuses all of Andrew Weil's expertise in both conventional and alternative medicine on a practical week-by-week, step-by-step plan, covering diet, exercise, lifestyle, stress, and environment - all of the aspects of daily living that affect health and well-being. And he shows how his program can be tailored to the specific needs of pregnant women, senior citizens, overweight people, and those at risk for cancer, among others.

Don't Let Your Anxiety Run Your Life: Using the Science of Emotion Regulation and Mindfulness to Overcome Fear and Worry

This is the first book to present an integrated model of mindfulness and emotion regulation - both clinically proven for reducing anxiety symptoms. Using these easy mindfulness practices, you'll learn to manage your emotions and lessen your anxiety, leading to improvements in your social life, work obligations, and family responsibilities.

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

The author of the blockbuster New York Times best sellers The Happiness Project and Happier at Home tackles the critical question: How do we change? Gretchen Rubin's answer: through habits. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life. It takes work to make a habit, but once that habit is set, we can harness the energy of habits to build happier, stronger, more productive lives.

Radical Beauty: How to Transform Yourself from the Inside Out

Deepak Chopra and Kimberly Snyder offer an exciting and practical program to help transform you from the inside out. Through six pillars of healthy living that focus on internal and external nourishment, sleep, living naturally, avoiding excessive stress, and better understanding the relationship between emotions and inflammatory foods, the authors offer practical tips, tools, innovative routines, and foods that will allow you to achieve your highest potential of beauty and health.

When it comes to health, there is one criminally overlooked element: sleep. Good sleep helps you shed fat for good, stave off disease, stay productive, and improve virtually every function of your mind and body. That's what Shawn Stevenson learned when a degenerative bone disease crushed his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Like many of us, he gave up on his health and his body...until he decided there must be a better way.

amy says:"What I needed to create a great morning and bed time routine"

The Gray Cook Lecture Compendium: A Collection of Gray Cook Lectures

The risk factors in exercise and athletics are going up. Why? Because people don't have enough information to know how to dose and scale the activities they do. The biggest problem in fitness today is not availability or access to fitness professionals, nor is it availability of information. It's a little simpler than that, and in this collection of recorded live lectures, Gray Cook explains what he's learned about movement and movement learning in his years as a physical therapist and strength coach.

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations - a subject that is anything but straight and narrow.

Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health, & Life

Beyond Training is for men and women who have made it out of couch potato mode and are ready to take things to the next level, whether that means shedding those last few extra pounds, finishing a 5K, or even crossing the finish line of an Ironman triathlon. Everyone from the casual exerciser to the weightlifter, CrossFitter, obstacle racer, marathoner, mountaineer, triathlete, swimmer, cyclist, runner, and biohacker will glean tons of knowledge and life-changing advice from this book.

W.A.I.T.loss: The Keys to Food Freedom and Winning the Battle of the Binge

Have you ever "felt fat"? Do you beat yourself up when one bite of cookie dough turns into eating the whole batch? Have you dieted yourself into a larger dress size? Are you frustrated because hours of exercise have produced zero results? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, you are not alone. Studies show that 75% of women suffer from some type of eating disorder. Whether it's bingeing, bulimia, or another addiction, the good news is there is hope.

The Oxygen Advantage: The Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques for a Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter You

Achieve more with less effort: The secret to weight loss, fitness, and wellness lies in the most basic and most overlooked function of your body - how you breathe. One of the biggest obstacles to better health and fitness is a rarely identified problem: chronic overbreathing. We often take many more breaths than we need without realizing it, contributing to poor health and fitness, including a host of disorders, from anxiety and asthma to insomnia and heart problems.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long Term Health

Genetics and lifestyle are thought to be the two most important determinants of good health. But that is not the whole story. We have a second genome, our gut bacteria, that sets the dial on our bodies. Unlike our DNA, we can influence the gut bacteria, or microbiota, to optimize all aspects of our health.

Fitness Confidential

America's Angriest Trainer, Vinnie Tortorich, exposes the nasty underbelly of the fitness industry while getting you into the best shape of your life. For over 20 years, Vinnie has been Hollywood's go-to guy for celebrities and athletes looking to get fit fast. Now, in this hilarious and often R-rated memoir, he holds nothing back. What's the best piece of fitness equipment money can buy? What's the fastest way to lose weight: diet or exercise? Why are health clubs worse than used car lots? In Fitness Confidential, Vinnie tells all.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Joining the ranks of popular science classics like The Botany of Desire and The Selfish Gene, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin - a "microbe's-eye view" of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on Earth.

Cardio Sucks: The Simple Science of Losing Fat Fast...Not Muscle

Forget "losing weight" - you want to lose fat...and if you want to know how to do it as quickly as possible without losing muscle...and without doing hours and hours of grueling cardio every week...then you want to listen to this audiobook. What if I told you that you could dramatically transform your body eating foods you actually like...every day...seven days per week?

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you'll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever.

Publisher's Summary

Every Wednesday, Gretchen Reynolds singlehandedly influences how millions of Americans work out. In her Phys Ed column for The New York Times, she debunks myths, spurs conversation, and creates arguments among her readers by questioning widely held beliefs about exercise.

Expanding upon her popular columns, Reynolds tackles the questions we all have and (sometimes) ask about exercise. Consulting experts in physiology, biology, psychology, neurology, and sports, she uncovers how often we should exercise, how long workouts should be, how to avoid injury, and how to find the right form, routine, and equipment for our goals.

She also reveals some surprising answers, like:

20 minutes of cardio at a time is enough to obtain maximum health benefits. (And in some cases, just six minutes is all you need.)*

Stretching before a workout is counterproductive. (It's better to just start easy, i.e., walk before you run.)

Core strength is nice but not necessary. (A six-pack looks great but actually has little bearing on performance.)

Walking improves your memory; housecleaning improves your mood. (The brain is like a muscle - it likes to exercise.)

Chocolate milk is better than Gatorade for recovery. (Providing the best sports nutrition is often the simplest.)

Drawing on scientific expertise as well as her own athletic experiences, Gretchen Reynolds will help you find the right workout for your body, age, fitness and goals. Whether your desire is to be fit for the rest of your life, to look great in a smaller dress size, or to run your third marathon in Boston, The First 20 Minutes will make your workouts work for you.

What the Critics Say

"[This audiobook] delivers answers to many perennial training questions [and] does a great job of myth-busting some well-established beliefs. It's a great guide for the mindful athlete who wants to gain all the benefits of physical training while minimizing downtime from injury or over-training." (Danny Dreyer, Founder of Chi Running and co-author of Chi Running, Chi Walking, and Chi Marathon)

"There has never been a better time in history to grow stronger, faster, and smarter; there has never been a more helpful book than Gretchen Reynolds's The First 20 Minutes. Smart, clear, and beautifully useful, this is the new fitness Bible for the modern age." (Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code and Lance Armstrong's War)

"The First 20 Minutes is packed with interesting tips and insights. Pickle juice for cramps, who would have ever thought! Gretchen Reynolds once again delivers a winner." (Dean Karnazes, uber athlete and New York Times best-selling author of UltraMarathon Man)

There are hundreds of good tips in this book. It dispels dozens of bits of long-held exercise dogma with plenty of hard science. I would put it in my top five books on exercise and nutrition, and I plan to download the Kindle version and will refer to it often.

If you could sum up The First 20 Minutes in three words, what would they be?

The research on exercise physiology has never been summarized so well before. Gretchen Reynolds does an outstanding job of presenting the research in an especially helpful manner. I am a medical doctor & runner who finds her writing enlightening & refreshing, as well as inspiring.

What did you like best about this story?

She is comprehensive, yet summarizes exercise physiology research in an extremely helpful manner.

What does Karen Saltus bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

She reads beautifully with appropriate emphasis in her voice.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

It would need to be a documentary. "Even very little exercise preserves the brain, as well as the entire body."

There is some important and interesting information here, but the narrator is not a great audiobook reader. So many of the better readers use their voice to help guide the listener to what is most important. This one seems excited about everything, which, ironically, made the book feel monotonous. She might do better with a different kind of book. Until I checked, I thought the book had been read by the author.

Okay I learnt a LOT from this book and would definitely recommend it. Gretchen squeezes a lot of the most recent findings related to exercise and nutrition into a concise and informative narrative.

This book has changed the way I think and do my exercise and have already incorporated HIIT style running sessions in my training with great results. There are many other gems of information but I won't spoil it. If you are remotely interested in fitness or just turning back the biological clock this is a must read.

Notes from a low-carb perspective...Unlike other books the author does not unnecessarily demonise fat, but seems not ready to make the leap to saying fat can be healthy, and Gretchen still conveys a carbohydrate centric view of diet which was a mild but not unexpected disappointment.

In the end her only concession was saying high fat diets are fine if you exercise, I might argue similarly for carb based diet, but thats still not mainstream opinion. Even if you are keto / paleo there is still plenty to learn from this book. enjoy.

So. Many. Pauses. Her reading style reminds me of a teacher reading to a classroom full of young children and there are so many pauses at sometimes-odd intervals that I found it difficult to connect the first part of many sentences with the last. I really don't think the performer captured the style of the writer on this one.

Was The First 20 Minutes worth the listening time?

Yes, but in small doses. Just when I would get so annoyed with the slightly-to-cheerful, breathy, pause-ridden reading that I would think about abandoning the effort altogether, I would learn something interesting enough to convince me to commit to one more chapter.

Any additional comments?

The material is interesting but it really could have been expressed using fewer words.

I'm obviously just kidding about living forever, but this book had a lot of useful information on how to be more healthy. Some of the info I didn't need to know, but most of it did pertained to me. The narrator was excellent; one of the best I've heard. I am very happy I listened to this book and have modified my workouts because of it. If you exercise I recommend this book. I think you will enjoy it and also learn from it. .

I would recommend that friends read this book rather than try to live through this narration of it.

What did you like best about this story?

Filled with great, up-to-date information

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The narrator detracted from the book in every possible way. At times she sounds like a computer-generated voice. She gets overly-perky at other times. The sentences are jerky, with pauses coming at odd times. It is difficult to follow the meaning of the sentences sometimes. I could only listen for brief intervals.

Any additional comments?

I was greatly looking forward to listening to this book, having heard the author on Fresh Air. I had read the first chapter of the book and I truly wish that I had ordered the book, rather than the audiobook. Let this be a lesson to me. From now on, I will listen to the sample before ordering. The narrator totally ruined this book for me. I've never written a review here before, but I feel so strongly about this poor choice of a narrator and I don't want anyone else to waste their money on it. Why couldn't they have let the author read her own book? She sounded great on Fresh Air.

I enjoyed listening to this while working out, as the research presented was inspiring and got me to exercise differently - like having a coach that knew physiological research whispering in my ear.

The "whispering" part, though, is the problem. The narrator's style was far too folksy and cutesy - like listening to my son's first grade teacher trying to get the kids ready for story time. She went so far as to "act" in different characters when she quoted science journals - to the point of (borderline offensively) putting on accents when quoting research from researchers with Chinese and Japanese names...

I do recommend this book to folks who need to be coaxed off the couch or who (like me) are a bit in a rut with workouts. And I'm sure the reader does a fine job with YA fiction and romance, but this book didn't match her skills.